Chain of Iron
“Why make him retrieve the bracelet himself from the house?” Grace said, puzzled. “I’m sure he would simply accept it if I offered it to him as a gift.”
Tatiana smiled. “Grace, you must trust me. The adventure of getting the thing will stick the bracelet in his mind. He will care about it—because he loves you, of course, but also because of the story it carries in his mind.”
Grace knew there was no point resisting. There was never any point resisting. Her mother was all she had; there was nowhere else she could go. Even if she confessed everything to James, threw herself on the mercy of his infamously brutish parents, she would lose everything. Her home, her name, her brother. And her mother’s wrath would burn her to nothing.
And there was another factor motivating her as well. All year, Tatiana had been dropping hints that this plan to enchant James Herondale was in some manner part of the plan to restore Jesse. She would not say so outright, but Grace was not so stupid that she could not put two and two together. Perhaps there were limits to what she would willingly do for the sake of her mother. But to have Jesse back in a physical form, alive and safe, would change Grace’s life immeasurably. She would do whatever was necessary to save him, so that he might save her.
21
HELL’S OWN TRACK
“Turn again, O my sweetest,—turn again, false and fleetest:
This beaten way thou beatest I fear is hell’s own track.”
“Nay, too steep for hill-mounting; nay, too late for cost-counting:
This downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.”
—Christina Gabriel Rossetti, “Amor Mundi”
Grace was weary of winter, weary of stepping into slush puddles that stained her kid boots, weary of the cold that seeped into her thin frame when she went out, finding its way under her skirts and into the fingers of her gloves and to the very core of her, until it seemed she’d never feel warm again.
She had lived through many other winters, huddled inside Blackthorn Manor. But this winter she’d spent most of her nights sneaking out. She’d return to the Bridgestocks’ chilled to the bone, only to find the bedcovers ice-cold, the warmth long gone from the ceramic hot-water bottle at the foot of the bed.
Tonight, though, Grace would much rather have been in her small room at the Bridgestocks’, perhaps visiting with Jesse, than where she was—working up the courage to break into the Consul’s house as a chill winter wind sliced through her coat, and night owls hooted in the branches of the trees in the square.
She’d have thought everyone would be asleep at this hour, but annoyingly, light still glowed from the well windows below street level. Maybe Henry Fairchild had left them on by accident? He was certainly absentminded enough for that to be a possibility. Unless she wanted to freeze to death, she would just have to take her chances.
She slunk along the side of the building toward the stairs down to the furnace room, which connected to the lab via a narrow, dank passage that hardly anyone ever used. She had brought the master key to the house that she’d filched from Charles long ago. She was just glad he was still in France, in no position to find out what she was up to.
She slipped inside and crept along in the dark, following the weak light that spilled into the narrow passageway up ahead. The laboratory door had been cracked open slightly; she peered through the gap and saw the room empty, Henry’s work area as untidy as usual.
She stepped inside—and jumped. There was Christopher Lightwood, perched in the corner on a wooden stool, turning a peculiar object over in his hand. What is he doing hiding in a corner? she thought furiously. Couldn’t he sit at the table like a normal person, where she could have spied on him properly?
She smiled, opening her mouth to lie—she was on an errand for Charles, he’d left something in his old room—when Christopher turned and blinked at her.
“Oh! It’s you,” Christopher said with his usual sunny smile. “I thought it might be rats again. Hullo, Grace.”
“It’s awfully late,” she said conversationally, as if she ran into young men in cellars every day. “Do the Fairchilds know you’re here?”
“Oh, I’m here all the time,” he said, holding the peculiar object up to the light. It looked like a strange stele. “Henry’s got loads of equipment, and he doesn’t mind if I use it.”
“But—aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” Grace asked, approaching the worktable.
“Why would I do that?” Christopher seemed genuinely puzzled. “You’re affianced to Charles—surely you have a right to be here.”
She cleared her throat. “It’s a surprise for Charles. Could I convince you to take pity on me and help me find a particular ingredient?”
Christopher slid off the stool. “You’re working on a scientific surprise for Charles? I never thought he had much interest in science.” He set his odd stele down on the workbench. “Would you like a quick tour of the laboratory? I daresay it’s the best-equipped scientific workshop in London.”
Grace was nonplussed. She hadn’t compelled him to offer her the tour; he’d come up with that on his own. She could have reduced him to a babbling lump, she thought, saying things like I would die in order to help you with anything you could possibly desire, his eyes crossed with longing. But as Christopher seemed honestly chuffed at the chance to show off his beakers and tubes and vials, she found herself holding back.
She didn’t like using the power, really, she thought, as he led her to a series of shelves containing tiny jars full of colorful substances and started telling her about a table of chemical elements invented by a scientist in Russia a number of years earlier. Using it made her feel tied to her mother. To the darkness her mother served.
As she studied the contents of the little jars, Christopher told her about the way magic and science could be combined to create something entirely new. She didn’t quite follow, but she surprised herself by wanting to know more as he talked about the purpose of various objects and instruments, the experiments he and Henry conducted, the things they discovered.
Grace was reminded of the time he had given her a ride home from a picnic last summer during the demon attacks. He’d told her then about his love of science without being the least bit condescending, as her male admirers often were, or self-important in the way Charles always was. Christopher treated her as an equal whose enthusiasm for science was not only similar to his own but unsurprising.
“What were you working on when I came in?” she asked, truly curious, as he concluded the tour of the shelves and bins crammed with neatly labeled specimens and ingredients.
Christopher led her back to the stele and handed her a magnifying lens so that she could view the designs more closely. They were very odd—not quite the runes she was used to seeing on the skin of Shadowhunters, but not entirely unlike them either.
“It’s not a real stele at all,” he said. “I’ve been calling it a pithos, because it turns into a sort of box, too. I could try to melt down the material, see if it’s really adamas, but the problem is that once you melt something down, you can’t put it back the way it was.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “May I handle it?”